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Comment by Dalewyn | Hacker News Reader

This comment from Slashdot[1] suggests it might be a case of execs taking more in pay than they should.

[1]: https://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=23296842&cid=64409...

The pay listed in that comment doesn’t seem particularly outrageous for C-level execs in an organization, even a non-profit

"2022 Revenue $3,985,587 - Expenses $4,176,409 - Net Income -$190,822 - Net Assets $3,430,821 Executive Compensation $821,106 Executive compensation as a percent of total expenses 19.7%"

That's a pretty hefty fee for a few people.

How many is "a few"?

Continuing to read for you:

"Alaina P. (CEO) - $193,725 Jo Anne R. (President Product & Communication) - $184,085 Samaria R. (Chief People And Inclusion Of) - $169,913 Shanna G. (Chief Program Officer) - $137,760 Lise R. (CFO) - $135,625"

Of course that’s what it is.

Maybe it's just my tech reality distortion field but the CEO making less than $200k/y sounds, if anything, abnormally low.

Edit: Savage-Rabbit over on /. said it best: why do you hate capitalism?

I don't hate capitalism, I like it.

However, pay scales in accordance with revenue. If you are running red ink (as was the case here) and you can't increase revenue sufficiently, then costs including payroll should be decreased to get back in the black.

Multiple executives each taking somewhere around $150,000.00 in pay when you're in the red is arguably too much compensation.

Yeah, that's how capitalism works. Any compensation is too much compensation if you're in the red. You can't sustain a business if revenues won't sustain hiring at market rates. So they shut it down. Duh, capitalism. This budget is such a non-story it's really weird how much attention it's getting.

Like, did you actually write out that extremely rounded salary estimate down to the penny and full punctuation just because you want that junior-dev-level salary to look extra big? Why the gimmick?

Are you interested in having a sincere conversation or not?

There is an argument to be made that there is plenty of room for reduction in the compensation the executives received in order to get back in the black, along with any other cost cutting measures. That's why I wrote out the six figure compensation.

If they felt inclined to just shut down rather than try to make ends meet, that's their prerogative. It doesn't make their decision to shut down any less perplexing, though.

> If they felt inclined to just shut down rather than try to make ends meet, that's their prerogative.

You do understand that the alternative is asking people to work for below-market rates, right? At a non-profit where there will never be an "exit strategy" by law?

So you're the boss now, you've got $75k to offer a new CFO. Where do you find a qualified candidate, and why do they want to work for you and not a comparable organization offering twice as much?

Sometimes, shutting down is the smart move.

The red amounts to around $190,000.00. Let's round that up to $200,000.00 for good margin. If the five executives each took a $40,000.00 reduction in their pay (and that's over the course of a year, mind), that alone puts them back in the black. $40,000.00 isn't a small amount to take off your paychecks, but relatively speaking it's a pittance when the reward is continuing operations and what your paycheck was and would be.

So getting the books straight wasn't that difficult, especially if the people concerned were passionate in their cause. This was a non-profit, after all. If they want to shut down instead, that's within their rights but it's nonetheless perplexing they gave up so quickly.

Sincerely: you don't sound very business-savvy, if you think five executives are just gonna eat a 20% pay cut like that.

If executives kill their organization because they take out too much in pay relative to revenue and other costs, yeah they aren't very business savvy indeed.

Bain Capital disagrees!

Bain Capital only destroyed other businesses. The business of plundering other businesses remained solvent.

Fascinating. An individual pirate is a business slouch; a team of pirates is a business savant?

Business is fundamentally a question of how to rip someone off without pissing them off.

To bring this discussion full circle, sounds like those executives were quite business-savvy after all.

Maybe that compensation was tied to some gameable metric like adjusted EBITDA as so many startups do. Or free cash flow like at Warner Brothers.

https://variety.com/2024/biz/news/warner-bros-discovery-davi...

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